The Break in the Heart
by gypsymuse
Summary: Post-ep, spoilers for 5X16. He had gambled, and lost.  But were they walking toward something, or walking away?
1. Chapter 1

Here's my take on what happened immediately after the end of the 100th episode. Should I go on with this, or does it stand as a one-shot?

Disclaimer: _Bones_ belongs to Hart Hanson, FOX, and the actors who give these characters life. I'll get them home safely before curfew, I promise.

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**The Break in the Heart**

_by Gypsymuse  
_

For a time there were only small sounds between them as they crossed the mercifully-deserted mall: the metronomic click of her heels, faint splashes from stepped-in puddles, the rustle of fabric on fabric, and the gradual slowing to normal of their breathing. Her arm was hooked through his, her hand's grip on his forearm still retaining its panicked tightness; he could feel the weight of her head against his shoulder, feel her tears still soaking into his shirt, feel the silk of her hair against his own damp cheek. They walked on and he had no idea where they were going. The chasm between where they'd been an hour ago and this place was immeasurably vast.

He'd gambled, and seen the wreckage of his fortune in Brennan's terrified eyes. Status quo had long since ceased being enough for him, but apparently the idea of changing it was too much for her to bear. _I can't change,_ she'd said; _I don't know how_--which was closer to the truth, though of course she had already changed, far more than she realized. He knew her well enough to know the source of her fear--Hell, he even shared it to some extent; their friendship, their relationship, was already a precious thing to him, and the thought of losing it scared him too. But the thought of walking away from everything else he _knew_ they could be to each other, that was worse, and he'd had to try. And now she held tight to him as though letting go meant losing everything, and he didn't have the strength to push her away. He'd told her he had to move on, but it was a mostly hollow threat; she consumed him so completely there would be very little room for anyone else for a very long time.

They reached the end of the concourse and he steered her, with infinite gentleness, back in the direction of the Hoover Building's parking garage. "Come on," he murmured, into the crown of her head, "let's get you home. It's getting late." Her hand instantly tightened around his wrist, and she raised her head so quickly he had to jerk back to avoid a collision of her skull and his nose.

"No. Booth, I--"

"Bones, it's all right. Look, let's just--let's just table the discussion for now, okay? Now was not the right time. I shouldn't have let Sweets goad me like that. I just--"

"I'm sorry," she blurted, stopping dead and pulling him around to face her. "Oh, God, Booth, I'm so _sorry_."

"So am I, but we'll get past this. We will. Hey." He lifted her chin, looked deep into her streaming eyes, and wondered dimly how the hell he was managing to comfort _her_ when everything inside him felt like shattered glass. "Hey, Bones. We're the center, remember? And--"

"--the center must hold," she finished for him, in as small and shaky a voice as he'd ever heard from her. He nodded, accepting her into his arms as she collapsed back into him.

"We will," he said again, and she startled him by raising up and kissing him--not passionately as she once had, or desperately as he had earlier kissed her, but firmly, decisively, as one might to seal a deal. Which, he realized, was exactly what she was doing.

"We will," she echoed, stepping back from the embrace. Falling into step beside him, her hand found his and twined their fingers together. "We _will_ hold."


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks to everyone who commented on the first part. And now things take a bit of a turn...

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**The Break in the Heart**

by Gypsymuse

* * *

When Booth arrived at the Jeffersonian the next day, he was immediately intercepted by Angela Montenegro, who appeared to be in a state of mild panic.

"Thank GOD you're here," she hissed, grasping his arm and towing him along to her office. "Brennan's acting weird."

"How can you tell?" The quip earned him a smack. "Hey!"

"I'm serious." She shoved him over the threshold and slammed the door, leaning back against it to prevent his escape. "She came in late this morning, which she never does, and her eyes were all red and puffy like she hadn't slept. And she had this tragic look on her face, like her boyfriend just dumped her a week before prom, and when I asked her what was going on she said 'I can't talk about it right now,' and I swear to you she almost started crying."

Booth shifted, scratching nervously at the back of his neck. "Uh--"

"And that's not even the weirdest part. Some museum in Kentucky deaccessioned their mummy and donated it to us, and you _know_ how Bren feels about mummies; they're like her favorite thing ever, right? And this is a particularly disgusting one, Booth, this is a stuff-of-nightmares, horror-movie, coming-to-kill-you-in-your-sleep mummy--you'd think she'd be ecstatic. She's been looking forward to the thing getting here for about a week, but this morning when it arrived, she just told Hodgins to uncrate it and set it up on the platform and that she'd 'attend to it later.' ATTEND TO IT LATER! And then she went into her office and shut the door, and she's been in there ever since."

"Oh," said Booth, scratching harder and adding a facial tic to go with it. Angela's eyes narrowed.

"You were with her last night; did anything happen? I know you guys had that meeting with Sweets--did Sweets say something that upset her?"

"Well, uh, actually, I--I think it was what I said that--"

"Did you guys have a fight? About what Sweets wrote?"

Booth took a step back. "Whoa, Ange, you might want to dial back the enthusiasm a little bit there. It wasn't a _fight_, exactly."

"What did you say to her? It must have been pretty heinous to make her ignore a mummy."

Crossing the room, Angela seated herself at her desk and folded her hands upon it, looking at him with the patient expectation of a counselor; this of course reminded him unpleasantly of Sweets, and for the first time he felt irritation stirring. What happened was _theirs_, dammit, his and Bones'; it wasn't a nighttime drama for their friends to discuss over coffee at work. And yet there was something in Angela's expression--concern for her friend, perhaps, and what looked like real compassion for him--that made Booth flop down into the chair across from her and sigh heavily, fingers digging into his throbbing temples. When he spoke, it was in a level, almost-normal voice.

"I told her I wanted us to try being together."

Angela was instantly on the alert. "You mean, _together_ together, boyfriend-and-girlfriend together, or like page-187-together?"

"Thirty or forty or fifty years together-together." Booth had to repeat this, since the first time he said it it was a muttered moan stifled by the hands he'd dropped his face into. The response it elicited was predictable, but no less painful to his ever-intensifying headache.

"You SAID that to her? Oh. My. God. BOOTH! Did she freak, or just run away? Or maybe hit you?"

"She panicked. She said--she said she had to protect me, from her, and that she didn't have an open heart." He barked a small, joyless laugh. "I wish she'd just hit me."

"Wait. She said THAT to you? Well, that changes everything!" Seeing the look of miserable incomprehension on his tired face, Angela's soft heart took over. Going around to his side of the desk, she squatted beside his chair and rested one hand over the clenched knot of his two. "Sweetie, listen. This is Bren we're talking about here, remember? She's not like normal people. You may have noticed that she's kind of an overachiever? On the inside, she's still fifteen years old, wondering why she wasn't good enough for her family to love her anymore. All the degrees and best-sellers and digs in Whereveristan can't quite make up for that, you know?"

"You ever tell her all that?"

"Are you kidding me? I like all my teeth right where they are, thanks. Listen to me, Booth. I probably know her better than anyone--even you. She thinks she's broken. She thinks there's something wrong with her and that she always ends up pushing people away."

Now it was Booth's turn to look astonished. "She said THAT to you?"

Angela looked very smug. "I had to get her really drunk first, but yeah. That thing about protecting you from her? Is her very screwed-up, insane way of telling you she loves you--oh, don't look at me like that, you know she does. You've known her all this time, you can see how she's changed even if she can't acknowledge it. She loves you, but she's afraid she'll screw it up if you guys get together, and then you'll end up leaving her." She raised a stifling hand when Booth started to sputter in protest. "_I_ know that's stupid, and _you_ know that's stupid, but she's had half her life to develop this theory and she's not going to let it go without a fight. So what else happened?"

"I, uh, sort of grabbed her and kissed her."

"Did she hit you then?"

"She said all that stuff and I--I told her I was gonna have to move on, that I couldn't wait forever to find someone to--OW, hey!" Rubbing his damaged arm, he stared at the furious artist. "What was _that_ for?"

"That was for being INCREDIBLY stupid, Seeley Booth! That's why she's moping in her office and ignoring her dead guy and almost crying--you pretty much just told her you were leaving her!"

"I did not! _She's_ the one that didn't want _me_! What was I supposed to do, just sit on my ass for the next twenty years and wait for her to stop being broken?"

"Do you love her or not?"

"You know I do. Damn it, I think everyone in the world knows it by now, with the possible exception of Bones herself. And I did not tell her I was leaving her. She asked if we could still work together and I said yes. Don't _snort_ at me like that!"

"'Sure, baby, we can still be friends.' And what do you think is gonna happen when you get a girlfriend? Or get married?"

Booth flung his arms heavenward, staring up imploringly. "This is ridiculous. I can't take this. I am going to eat my gun."

"You have to fix this. I mean, yes, you screwed up big-time, first by just blurting out that craziness you said to her initially, then you compounded the screw-up by kind of giving her an ultimatum--yes, saying you were going to 'move on' was a totally passive-aggressive way of giving her an ultimatum, don't even try to deny it. She needs to know how you feel about her."

"After all this, I'm not even sure how I feel about anything."

"You'd better figure it out fast, before it really is too late and you've lost _her_." Angela stood, returning to her position behind her desk. "My work here is done. Did you come here for a reason?"

"Are you kidding? I'm in here because you _dragged_ me in here--"

"I mean to the Jeffersonian today. Do you have a case?"

"I was coming to invite her to lunch. We'd already made plans, before."

"Before. Right. Go, Booth. Take Bren to lunch. And, Booth?"

He turned, his hand on the doorknob. "Yeah?"

Angela smiled at him, sadness and sweetness intermixed. "Good luck."


	3. Chapter 3

The glass wall of Brennan's office revealed the woman herself, frowning at a pile of random objects scattered across the surface of her desk. These had apparently been unpacked from a battered cardboard box which currently teetered on the far edge of said desk. Booth steeled himself, rapped twice, then pushed the door open. The too-big smile he'd plastered to his face faltered only slightly when Brennan transferred her scowl from a bit of broken crockery to her partner.

"Booth! What are you doing here?"

"Nice to see you too, Bones," he replied, nudging the door shut with his foot and crossing the room to face her over the original source of her displeasure. "What's all this stuff? The Jeffersonian planning a yard sale?"

She lifted a strand of greyish-blue clay beads, holding them up for him to see. "These are grave goods, alleged to be from the burial of the mummy we received from a defunct small museum in Kentucky. Cataloguing them will be a job for our Egyptology department, of course, but I wanted to take a look at them myself first. Some of this stuff is in really deplorable condition--just look at this _shawabti_, for example." She put down the beads and held up a small greenish statue; the surface showed multiple large chips, and the features of the face were badly worn away. "I don't know what kind of 'museum' this place was, but they obviously had no conception of proper storage or conservation techniques."

"So who was this guy?" The collection of objects seemed pitifully small, the items homely and unimpressive: strands of crude-looking beads, small statues like the _shawabti_ she'd mentioned, pieces of broken pottery, a handful of tiny carved forms. Sweeping a fallen strand of hair behind one ear, Brennan looked up from her perusal of the little figure.

"_She_ was a Late Period priestess, according to the records; a 26th Dynasty chantress named Nefret-sat-Amunet. And that's what makes these objects so puzzling; it is my understanding that most women who held that position by that era were daughters of noble families. These are not the burial goods of a wealthy woman or a priestess. The glyphs are almost completely eroded away, but I'm certain these _shawabtis_ weren't hers; they're of a common, almost generic type, and depict a male figure."

Booth dropped into the chair across from her, surprised by her once again--though _why_ he was surprised, he couldn't say. The woman loved mummies. Watching old Boris Karloff movies had started her down the road to super-squintdom. Of _course_ she'd have enough Egyptological knowledge to bore him for hours. Of _course._ "So the museum just tossed whatever junk they had laying around into a box and shipped it all to you along with the mummy?"

"So it would appear. It's not uncommon for smaller museums to have artifacts of this type on display; they're plentiful, easy to find, and relatively cheap to purchase. Her tomb was probably robbed in antiquity; most of them were, particularly those of wealthier individuals, and a high-ranking noblewoman near the top of her profession would certainly have had goods worth plundering. It's a shame, though. I would have liked to have seen some of her belongings." She sifted through the items again, stirring the pile of bead strands with one finger. "I can only wonder to whom these objects belonged, and what they might have meant to them. A peasant woman might have cherished this simple necklace as her most prized possession, perhaps given to her by someone--look, see the pendant?"

Booth nodded, looking at the indistinguishable lump she indicated. He wondered what she'd been about to say during that rather sentimental speech, but knew better than to ask. She'd always had a clearer view of the dead than the living.

"It's crudely done and badly worn, but you can see that it's the form of a seated cat. This was a votive object, a theophany of the goddess Bast, who often took the form of a cat or a cat-headed woman. She was very popular with female devotees, and her festivals were reported by Herodotus as being filled with wild and licentious behavior. It was said that more alcohol was consumed during the annual festival of Bast than during all the other months of the year combined."

"Par-tay," Booth murmured, and they both stared at the tiny cat. It was easier than looking at each other. Brennan was about to launch into another lecture topic when the office door burst open, spilling Hodgins into the room.

"Just look what I have for you," he crowed, crossing the room and presenting an ovoid green item with all the pomp of a vassal offering tribute to his king. "When we opened up the crate there was another little package of artifacts packed in with her. There were several different amulets, but I knew you'd want this one right away." He stepped back, expectant, and Booth was astonished by the way her face lit up, because to him it looked like Hodgins had handed her a dirty rock. Brennan was nothing short of delighted.

"A heart scarab!"

"Just the kind of bug you like, Dr. B. I can't read the hieroglyphs, but I suspect there may be something on there that can ID our lady."

Flipping the item over, she peered closely at it, before finally holding it up for both men to see. She indicated a row of incised glyphs with one gloved finger. "Yes, see right there? Her name is very distinctive--you can see the _nefer_ symbol, which is thought to be a stylized representation of the heart and trachea. And here is the symbol of the god's name, with the feminine suffix _-et_. You can tell that a space was left on the scarab for the name to be filled in later, indicating that it wasn't carved specifically for her but was purchased and personalized at the time of her death. Good work, Hodgins. Be sure you sift through the packing materials carefully, just in case any other objects might have gotten dislodged in transit."

"I'll let you know. See ya, Booth." And he was off, muttering happily about his ongoing status as King of the Lab.

Booth had to break the silence that descended after Hodgins' departure, as his partner seemed to have entered an artifact-induced trance; she was holding the scarab in the palm of her left hand, her right index finger tracing delicately over its surface. Her gaze was faraway, fixed upon the small treasure, and Booth wondered what she was seeing there.

"So, a heart scarab," he said at last, voice loud in the ticking silence of the room. Brennan nodded, not looking up.

"Yes. The Egyptians believed--erroneously--that the heart was the seat of intellect and cognition, rather than the brain. As you know, during the embalming process, the brain was removed by means of a sharpened hook inserted through the nasal cavity--"

"Not only did I not know that, I absolutely did not _need_ to know that."

She looked up at that, smirking. "While other organs were removed and either thrown away or prepared separately and stored in ritual vessels, the heart remained within the mummy. The heart scarab is a special amulet that is designed to keep one's heart from betraying them in the presence of the divine judges in the afterlife."

"How can your heart betray you?" Booth asked curiously, looking at the scarab with sharper interest. He knew Brennan heard the double meaning in the question by the way her breathing changed, and kept his eyes assiduously away from hers. Skittish as a new colt when emotional topics were breached, she was best approached obliquely, in a manner that would allow her to answer from the comfortable distance science could provide her.

"It was thought that one's heart might reveal things to the assessors that it would be imprudent for them to know--things that might jeopardize one's happiness in the afterlife. They believed that the heart held all of a person's secrets, and would reveal them if not persuaded to keep quiet by means of magical spells. The heart scarab is inscribed with the spell used for that purpose."

"So the heart couldn't lie."

"Presumably not, but there were assumed to be things that it shouldn't reveal, lest the person lose their chance of any peace and happiness in the life to come."

Unconsciously, Booth reached out for the scarab. Brennan swatted his hand away. "Not without gloves," she admonished, reaching into her desk drawer and coming up with a pair. After he snapped them into place, she very gently placed the scarab into his upturned palms, holding her hand over it for just a moment before drawing away.

"It's broken, anyway," she murmured, fiddling with a loose bead from the pile. "See the crack?"

"Sure, it's cracked, but it's not _broken_. Damaged, but not destroyed. Why, does a crack mean it won't work right?"

"Assuming that magical spells and amulets held any quantifiable power--which of course they _don't_--then maybe. The appearance of the crack suggests that it has been there for a very long time." She reached over and traced the line of the damage. Booth shifted his grip so that her hand was clasped between both of his, the amulet secure between them.

"I've heard that bones knit back stronger than they were before they were broken," he said at length. "Is that true?"

"No," she replied promptly. "That is a myth. But a broken bone that heals properly with no complications regains the full strength that it held before the injury."

"Maybe that's true of muscles, too."

"The Japanese have a belief that a thing that has been broken and repaired is even more beautiful than before, because of its flaws rather than in spite of them. It is the imperfection that gives the object its strength." Her voice was low, but rang out clearly in the quiet room. When she raised her head and looked directly, almost defiantly, at him, he could almost feel his own heart crack. He prayed it wouldn't betray him again.

"There are always complications, Bones, but I think maybe the Japanese have it right. Maybe a cracked heart is better than one that's never been touched at all."

Carefully, delicately, she extracted her hand from between his, leaving the artifact still cradled in his palms as she rose from her chair and disappeared into her bathroom. Booth sank back deflated, releasing the enormous tension he'd been unaware of for the past however many minutes. Pinching the bridge of his nose with his left hand, he replaced the scarab dead-center on her desk blotter with his right. When Brennan returned, she was composed and serene as always, and only the softness of her expression and the tender redness around her eyes betrayed her. That, and her cracked and mending heart.

Booth stood up and reached for her hand, then dropped it in favor of draping an arm around her shoulders instead. "Come on, Bones, it's past time for lunch. Anything you want; I'm buying."

And that was truer than even she knew.


End file.
